Published on March 4, 2026 [Episode 446]
Apology: Helen Veit’s audio has a lot of “ducking”, in which a word or multiple words were clipped. This happened during the recording, and cannot be fixed in the audio edit. We'll work hard to make sure this never happens again.
Introduction
In nineteenth-century America, cookbook authors, concerned doctors, and food reformers believed that children had a problem with food. The problem was not that they rejected vegetables or demanded sweets. It was that they were too eager and undiscriminating about what they ate. Children, reformers worried, would “eat anything and everything.” If they were to grow into healthy adults, they needed a special diet—“children’s food”—which meant that for the first time in human history children would have to eat differently from everyone else.
That moment was one step along a path that my guest Helen Zoe Veit traces in her new book Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History. Beginning in a mid-nineteenth century world in which children routinely ate oysters, organ meats, sauerkraut, and richly spiced dishes alongside adults, she carries the story forward to our own moment—an era of childhood obesity, nutritional anxiety, supermarket abundance, and the widespread assumption that children are “food rejectors by nature.” But as Veit argues, mass childhood pickiness is not deeply biological. It is overwhelmingly cultural. And culture, unlike biology, can change.
About the Guest
Helen Zoe Veit is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. She specializes in American food history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is the author and editor of numerous works on food, morality, and culture. Picky is her latest book.
Reflection Questions
Why did nineteenth-century Americans worry that children were not picky enough—and what does that reveal about changing ideas of health and biology?
How did technologies such as refrigeration, processed food, and the supermarket alter not just what families ate, but how children learned to eat? What were changes in cultural practice that were perhaps just as important
If mass childhood pickiness is cultural rather than biological, what would have to change in order to reshape that culture?
For Further Investigation
Helen Zoe Veit, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)
Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: A Handbook for Parents of the Developing Child from Birth through Adolescence (Dutton, 1998)
Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2023)
Ruth Schwarz Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave (Basic Books, 1985)
Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin, 2009)
Related Episodes
Cuisine and Empire: Rachel Laudan on the world history of food
The History of Keeping Things Cold: Jonathan Rees on ice, refrigeration, and the rise of the modern cold chain
Breakfast Cereal: A global history of grains, health, and culture with Kathryn Cornell Dolan
Street Food: Charlie Taverner on street vendors, London, and the history of urban eating
Tags
Food History, History of Childhood, History of Parenting, Family History, Nutrition,
