... on eating habits of kids

Why do we initiate our eating lives liking such bland foods?

Food minded parents are constantly complaining that their children like only starches (pasta, rice and potatoes), the blandest cheeses, and tasteless meats (especially the white meat of chicken).

Observing the eating habits of small children provides clues to their developing an understanding of food.

How can children be set straight about food before it’s too late?  

First, as parents have long maintained, children do indeed prefer starches and meats. The cheeses they choose are almost always ones with minimal taste and a smooth texture. It may be a sign of times that bread was the starch least often selected, behind pasta, rice, and fried potatoes. The most popular dishes were French fries, small sausages, quiches, pasta, breaded fish, rice, mashed potatoes and ham. Children make little distinction between them, choosing roast pork, turkey and leg of lamb almost universally. But when it came to vegetables, which were chosen less often than meats, preferences were quite clear, depending on the type of vegetable and the nature of culinary preparation. Spinach, which is so widely thought to be disliked by children, was selected more often and consumed in greater quantities than any other vegetable as long as it was napped with a white sauce. Endives, cabbage (raw or cooked), tomatoes, and green beans appealed to few of the young diners, however. It appears that foods with a challenging and fibrous texture (which makes them hard to chew) are more likely to be refused, as are those with a distinct bitter flavour.

How are we to understand all this? It occurred to the sensory biochemists in Dijon to try to understand the selection of foods to their nutritional content. What they discovered was that the higher the caloric value of food, the more often it is chosen (with the exception of cheeses). Is this evidence that natural personalities are still strong in young children? It is a fact that infants who are fed salt, sweet, sour or bitter liquids react visibly with contempt in the case of the last two flavours but show pleasure when they encounter a sweet taste. In this, they resemble fruit-eating monkeys, who identify sweetness with the presence of sugars and bitter with vegetables that contain toxic alkaloids. Gradually children come to understand, through conditioning and culture, to diversify their diet.