Picky Eating Part Two
Praise for Helen Veit's wonderful new book, Picky, How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History. Recipe for Cherry Sorbet and lots of cherry information in The Kitchen Playground.
As I’ve said here before, I’m fascinated by picky eating. Looking back, it’s clear that I was a picky eater when I was a child, but we talked about it differently then. Today, picky eaters are defined by not being willing to try things, and to reject whole categories of food based on, well, who knows what, sometimes color, sometimes texture, sometimes something else. I was willing to try foods, but just didn’t like a lot of them, particularly foods that kids were “supposed to like”, including soda, chips, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I lived in NYC, and The Sixth Avenue Deli was down the street from our apartment. My parents often ordered takeout on Sundays. To everyone’s amusement, it was the one day that I ate a lot, and my grandparents used to say that Sundays were the only day I ate.
I’m going to guess that Helen Veit, the author of Picky, How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History (St. Martins Press, 2026) would not be surprised that the one food I ate regularly was high in flavor, rather than the typical bland foods kids were eating.
I’m a huge fan of Helen’s, and of her book. It’s a fascinating romp through the history of kids eating, and while I agree with her conclusions (that it doesn’t have to be this way), the book is a very comprehensive and fascinating history of how kids have been eating through the centuries (they ate everything). For anyone who has a picky eater, was a picky eater, or is interested in the history of eating, I cannot recommend it more. My copy is full of underlinings, stars and exclamation marks.
Kids used to eat everything, especially foods we would consider “not for kids”. “Serve them”, writes Helen, “exactly the same interesting, flavorful foods you’re eating yourself, and talk openly about how and why you like them.”
What happened between then and now? From her epilogue:
Children started coming to meals less hungry.
It became easy to offer alternative foods.
Without evidence, psychologists claimed that encouragement and rewards were harmful.
Suddenly, all the positive messages were for junk food.
Everybody started blaming taste buds.
Finally, parents utterly lost confidence.
Not surprisingly, I think the best way to get kids to eat a wide variety of foods is to get them to cook. Start small.
Recipe: Cherry “Sherbet”
Cherries are just now in season but we like to use frozen cherries for this recipe. Buy a bag or practice pitting cherries and freeze your own.
If we didn’t add the yogurt, it would be called sorbet; sherbet is a frozen fruit-based dessert that has a little bit of milk or cream—or, in this case, tangy yogurt—added to it.
Active time 10 minutes/Total time 10 minutes/Makes 4 servings
Kitchen Gear
Measuring cups
Food processor (adult needed)
Spatula
Ingredients
1 (12-ounce) bag frozen pitted cherries (2 cups)
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1/4 cup almond butter
Instructions
Put the frozen cherries in the bowl of the food processor fitted with a steel blade and pulse until the cherries are well chopped.
Add the yogurt and almond butter and process until smooth. Serve right away.
Kitchen Playground: How to Pit a Cherry, Cherries by the Numbers, and Edible Vocabulary
How to Pit a Cherry
If you don’t have a special cherry-pitting tool, you can use a chopstick to get the pits out! Check out this video:
Balance a cherry, stem-side-up, on the mouth of an empty water bottle. If there’s still a stem, remove it.
Hold a chopstick in the hand you write with and hold the fruit steady with the other hand, then push the chopstick straight down through the fruit. The pit should fall into the bottle (if it doesn’t, you can tug it out with your fingers).
Cherries by the Numbers
● Al Gliniecki of Gulf Breeze, Florida, set a Guinness World Record by tying 39 cherry stems into knots in 3 minutes using his tongue.
● The heaviest cherry ever weighed 26.45 g (almost an ounce) and was grown in Italy in June 2020.
● The average cherry tree produces around 4,000 cherries in a single growing season. (That’s a lot of sherbet!)
Edible Vocabulary
● “Pretty please with a cherry on top!” means please—and then a little extra. Where do you think that expression comes from?
● A drupe is another name for a stone fruit—the kind that has a single pit in the middle. Drupes include cherries and peaches. Can you think of any other fruits that might be drupes?
● What do you think the expression “Life is a bowl of cherries” means? Why?
My mother always said, "the eye eats." Make how you serve food appealing too.