from one to three. But this coincides with a period in the child’s life when they are most maddeningly, wilfully reluctant to try anything new. All children suffer from neophobia to a greater or lesser extent – a fear of new foods, often novel vegetables but also very commonly protein foods such as fish and meat. This reaches a peak between two and six. It probably evolved as a safety mechanism to protect us from toxins as we foraged in the wild. Now, unfortunately, it leads children away from the very foods they need to learn to like – vegetables and protein – and towards the comforting embrace of cakes, white bread and doughnuts.
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 they haven’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 they 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 because it makes the child dislike the vegetables even more. Psychologists call this the over-justification effect.51 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 favourite 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 ahhed 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 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.52
Most children get over the worst of their fear of new food 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 flavours that can look suspiciously like showing off. My oldest child, the one who doesn’t like chocolate, is like this. His favourite 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 flavoured 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 cornflake boy was seen – outside 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 behaviour 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 condiments. 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 colour – you may make no attempt to change them, because what’s the point? In a 2013 journal article called ‘Why Don’t They Like That? And Can I Do Anything about It?’ nutritionists interviewed sixty Australian parents about their children’s likes and dislikes.53 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 – celeriac’s her favourite!’. 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 not just to persuade children 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 research54 – 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 a pavement 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