As the name suggests, neophobia isn’t just a dislike of how something tastes; it is an active fear of tasting it. In many cases, neophobia can be broken down simply by feeding the food to the child numerous times—often as many as fifteen—until the child realizes she hasn’t suffered any adverse consequences. See, the tomato didn’t kill you! See, it didn’t kill you again! Bit by bit, dislike is lessened, until one day it flips, almost comically, to enthusiasm. This has to be done over and over for each new ingredient. A child’s love of cantaloupe is no guarantee that she will like watermelon.
The biggest problem with using “mere exposure” on children is that you first have to persuade them to try the food. Exposing a child to broccoli multiple times is easier said than done. As any parent who has ever tried to feed a recalcitrant toddler will know, the best-intentioned strategies often backfire. “Eat your vegetables and you can have a sweet” is a dangerous game to play; it can make the child dislike the vegetables even
more. Psychologists call this the
overjustification effect
. When a reward is offered for performing an activity, that activity is valued less. The child ends up loving sweets more, because they have become a prize.
Given that neophobia is a deep-seated fear that the unfamiliar food will cause you harm, it can help if the child witnesses someone else eating the food and surviving—preferably even enjoying it. I did not know that this was what I was doing, but after various futile attempts to get my daughter, then three, to eat something green other than cucumber, I hatched the idea of bringing her favorite doll to eat with us. This doll—a grubby-faced baby boy—sat at the table and proceeded to “eat” green beans as he oohed and aahed with ecstasy (or rather, I did). It felt pretty lame, but one day my daughter begged to be given some of the baby-doll’s green beans, too, and she has loved them ever since. Another successful strategy is combining a scary new food with a familiar old one. Both children and adults are more likely to try something new when it is served with a familiar condiment—a blanket of ketchup, say, that renders the new food safe enough to try. But as the food psychologist John Prescott has written, no amount of ketchup will induce most children to try a plateful of spiders.
Most children get over the worst of their fear of new foods by the age of six or seven. Up to this age, it is considered a normal stage of child development. Having conquered neophobia, they may flip over to neophilia: an ostentatious delight in novel flavors that can look suspiciously like showing off. My oldest child, the one who doesn’t like chocolate, is like this. His favorite foods change with capricious haste; dishes may please him at first, then bore him. He abhors plainness, grumbling that I always cook the same things for supper (charming!), and taking a macho delight in strongly flavored condiments. When he was eight, we went to Rome, just the two of us. At a famous offal restaurant, he selected from the menu a dish called “artichokes with lamb’s hearts and all the organs in the vicinity.” And ate it, too, with gusto.
For a significant minority, however, a terror of new food—or mixed-up food, or strange food or spicy food or food that just plain smells wrong—is never conquered. The numbers are high—it has been estimated that as many as a quarter of all adults are severely neophobic about what they eat. Fussiness in children is something we often joke about or laugh off.
The cornflakes boy was seen—outside of his family, anyway—as a comic figure rather than a tragic one.
But living as a neophobic adult is no joke. I’ve met grown men and women who quietly confessed that they could not bring themselves to eat any vegetables. One said she only felt safe when eating reheated frozen Yorkshire puddings, the main thing her mother, an alcoholic, cooked for her. Even now, the sight of vegetables nauseated her. This woman wasn’t stupid. She had not failed to comprehend that vegetables are healthy. She got it; but the roots of her behavior lay elsewhere, deep in the past.
Apart from the health implications of eating such a limited diet, it is socially awkward. Any meal in an unfamiliar setting is fraught with potential embarrassment. I spoke to another neophobic woman who said that whenever friends suggested a meal out, she had to call ahead to the restaurant to confirm that they could cook her a plain hamburger with absolutely no fixings. She ate no vegetables, though she was training herself slowly to like some fruits. When I asked why she disliked vegetables so much she laughed ruefully and said, “I think when I was about three, my mum got fed up with me being so fussy, so she decided to let me just have the things I liked.” Which meant processed meats, chips, and not much else.
The belief that tastes are a facet of personality—or genes—has dangerous consequences. If you think that children are born with certain inbuilt likes and dislikes—as fixed as eye color—you may make no attempt to change them, because what’s the point? In a 2013 journal article called “Why Don’t They Like It? And Can I Do Anything About It?” nutritionists interviewed sixty Australian parents about their children’s likes and dislikes. They found that parents of children who had unhealthy eating habits were much more likely to think there was little parents could do to influence their offspring’s tastes, because children were just born to be difficult eaters or not.
The parents of healthy eaters made very different comments. They talked about how a child’s tastes were not “set in stone.” One of the mothers said it was possible to “educate” the taste buds of children by exposing them to lots of different foods. Compared to the parents of unhealthy or neophobic eaters, parents of healthy eaters had a much stronger belief
in their own power to influence a child’s likes and dislikes. Because they believed their actions had an impact on the children, these parents did their best to create a food environment where the children could develop enough healthy likes for a “balanced diet.” Conversely, the parents of the unhealthy eaters thought there was nothing they could do; and so, from the sound of things, they had more or less given up.
You could, of course, read this study in a different way. Not all children are equally easy to feed, and there is undoubtedly a temperamental (and genetic) aspect to neophobia. Some toddlers are very much more reluctant to attempt new foods than others, no matter what parenting they receive. Maybe the parents of the healthy eaters chose to attribute their child’s good habits to their influence when really it was just luck (or genes). It’s easy to believe there is no such thing as genetic fussiness when your children eat well. When you are trapped in daily battles with a finicky toddler, enduring porridge thrown in the face and cauliflower on the floor, it can be irksome to listen to the smug parents whose children will “try anything—celery root’s her favorite!” Maybe the neophobic children really were harder to influence than the non-neophobic healthy eaters.
Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that the parents of the healthy eaters were right. Even if some of us take longer to warm up to vegetables than others, likes and dislikes are not predetermined. In most cases, it is perfectly possible to persuade children not just to eat vegetables, but to love them.
Dr. Lucy Cooke spends her days trying to figure out how
children’s dislike of vegetables can be reversed. Cooke’s research—in collaboration with colleagues at University College London, notably Jane Wardle—makes her hopeful that our genetic inheritance for food preferences can be overcome. After all, she herself was once a child who didn’t like vegetables, and now she is a slim, confident person who positively enjoys healthy eating, although she tells me one day at an outdoor café over toasted teacakes and mint tea that she does sometimes feel deprived to think of all the foods she could eat and doesn’t. “But one mustn’t say that!”
In Cooke’s view, the enterprise of weaning children onto solid food should be managed with a view to setting them up with healthy likes for life. When children actually enjoy vegetables—plus a range of whole foods from all the other nutrient groups—half the battles over dinner disappear. Most parents see the aim of feeding as getting as much wholesome food into a child as possible. We focus too much on short-term quantity—kidding ourselves that if they are pacified with enough baby rice they’ll sleep better—and not enough on building long-term tastes. “The only mums we see who talk about developing a child’s palate are French,” in Cooke’s experience.
From four to seven months, it seems that there is a window when humans are extraordinarily receptive to flavor, but by following current guidelines on exclusive breastfeeding, parents tend to miss it. Several studies have shown that when vegetables are introduced at this age, babies are more open-minded. It takes fewer exposures to persuade them to like a new flavor, and the effects are long-lasting. When seven-month-old babies in Germany were exposed to a vegetable puree that they particularly disliked—such as spinach or green bean—it took only seven attempts for them to like it as much as their once-preferred carrot puree. Two months later, all but 10 percent of the children still enjoyed the once-hated vegetable, even though they had now reached an age of greater wariness. The flavor window is only fully open for a short time, and it seems to begin closing even at the age of four to six months. A 2014 study found that when babies were introduced to a single vegetable at six months—pea puree—they ate significantly less of it than babies who were introduced to a range of purees at four months.
For this reason, Cooke disagrees with the 2001 directive from the World Health Organization saying that babies should be offered an exclusive diet of breast milk for six months, with no additional solid food. This WHO report forms the basis of official guidelines to mothers in most countries, even though the statistics behind it were mostly from the developing world, where the risks of moving away from exclusive breastfeeding before six months—such as an increased chance of gastroenteritis and faltering growth—outweigh the benefits. In rich countries, the norm is for most mothers to stop breastfeeding, exclusive or otherwise, well
before six months. In the United Kingdom, just 1 percent of mothers are still exclusively breastfeeding at six months after birth. In the United States, it is 18.8 percent. The main effect of the official guidelines is to hold many formula-fed babies back from experiencing any flavor except for milk between the ages of four and six months. Here, the real risk is in producing children with limited tastes who will be set up for a lifetime of unhealthy eating. So often, we fail to see the long-term picture.
It’s not that a four-month-old baby is likely to grow any better in the short term when his or her diet includes a spoonful here and there of vegetables. It’s that waiting until six months to wean is to miss two months in which a child could be tasting different vegetables every day, which would prepare the child for a recognition—and hence liking—of those same vegetables at a later stage.
The second mistake parents make—and they are encouraged to do this by those baby-feeding guides with their brightly organized charts of first foods—is starting children off with bland, honeyed tastes, such as carrot, butternut squash, and sweet potato. Start with those vegetables that are naturally sweet, urges the United Kingdom’s best-selling author on baby food, and save stronger flavors for later. The really useful thing, however, would be to get a baby used to more bitter or challenging vegetables: cauliflower, zucchini, spinach, broccoli, even sprouts. Weaning guides often advise sticking to a single vegetable for a whole week before switching—for fear of food allergies—but Cooke advocates lots of variety and daily changes to maximize exposure before the child enters the age of neophobia. When novel vegetables are offered to a six-month-old, the baby will often make the most dramatic expressions of horror and woe, screwing up the mouth and nose in ways that, on an adult face, would suggest torture. The hardest thing for parents is to press on with offering the food. “We have to persuade mums to ignore the face,” explains Cooke. Unlike Clara Davis, who wanted to see how babies would eat away from parental influence, Cooke has devised pragmatic experiments recognizing that parents are part of the feeding process. Her starting point is always looking at what parents already do when feeding children and trying to find evidence-based techniques to help them do it better.
What if you have missed the “flavor window” and are now attempting to feed a toddler who fears anything green? Is all hope lost? Cooke and colleagues found that even with school-age children, there was a great deal that could be done to change apparently fixed hatreds of certain foods. Their first revelation was that much of what manifests as fussiness is a response to the stressful situation of mealtimes. It can get to the extreme point where lunch itself is a “dislike”—the pressure, the heightened emotions—no matter what is served. Cooke found that if parents could do tasting sessions with children outside of meals, it could take emotion out of it. In addition, they only asked children to try pea-sized amounts of food, which reduces the feeling of pressure. “The demands on the child have to be very low.” A whole plate of cauliflower is a horrible prospect if you don’t like it. A minuscule fragment might just be okay.
Cooke helped devise a new system for encouraging more vegetable “likes,” called “Tiny Tastes.” It was trialed in both schools and homes and has proved remarkably effective in making children actually like raw vegetables such as carrots, celery, tomatoes, red peppers, and cucumbers. I used the scheme on my own youngest child—then aged four—and was startled how quickly it turned him from someone who said “yuck” when he heard the word “cabbage” to a happy nibbler of raw green leaves. It works like this: The parent and child together select a vegetable that the child currently moderately dislikes (as opposed to feeling deeply revolted by). Each day for ten to fourteen days, not at dinnertime, you offer the child a pea-sized amount. If she tastes it—licking counts, it doesn’t have to be swallowed—she gets a tick in a box and a sticker. If not, it’s no big deal; there is always tomorrow.