Hellobee

I was a very picky eater as a child and adolescent, and it continued into young adulthood until I met my husband. Last week, my dad watched as my daughter made loud smacking noises with her hand in her mouth. He joked that he never had to worry about me putting anything into my mouth as a baby or toddler because I was scared it would be food!

My dad raved about how I would eat green peppers like they were apples, and that I loved grapefruit, but meals were a bit of a battle. I distinctly remember taking a flight in kindergarten, and my dad’s camera bag was filled with jars of baby food for me to eat on the plane while he had packed his camera gear in with the luggage.  To this day when I get sick, my comfort food is pablum (infant cereal) and a jar of banana or chicken and rice baby puree.

My husband still calls me a picky eater, despite the fact that I am now at least willing to try everything once. This is something I would have never done before. His sister has coined me a “particular” eater, while others have just chalked it up to the fact that I was a spoiled only child. The following may make you think that my parents indulged me, but perhaps there’s more of a method to my madness than even I ever realized.

My mom says she always made three meals for our family at dinner time. One for herself (rice, meat vegetables), one for my dad (something more North American), and one for me – I remember macaroni with butter and rice and butter being two favorites. Basically something plain. Even when we went to McDonald’s I had a plain hamburger – no ketchup, no mustard, no pickles, no onion slurry. To this day that is still what I order there, because the outer edge of the inside of the bun has this deliciously crispy ring around it that disappears with condiments. I’m not fussy about the food on my plate touching the other food and absorbing their flavors, but would rather enjoy my rice all by itself than smothered in curry. Growing up this would usually generate the response, “It’s all going to the same place anyway.”

I remember going on a cruise to Mexico when I was in the fourth grade, and I avoided the mushrooms on my plate. An older lady at our table commented that I would probably grow out of it because our taste buds disappear as we grow older. I distinctly remember it was a texture thing, like how I couldn’t eat scrambled eggs, prawns, or scallops for decades because they triggered my gag reflex, and even now I dislike the variety of mushrooms they use in Chinese cuisine purely for their texture. I still pick out the fatty bits and ligaments in meat because of the texture, too. Now that I have read up on it, taste buds do wear out over time, and may result in duller taste sensations as we get older, so while broccoli may be pretty standard fare for an adult, for a child, it may taste much more bitter.

I do know that I have a much more heightened sense of smell than anyone else I’ve met. I can detect faint whiffs of scents in the air that no one else can. Thank goodness I didn’t have any smell aversions during my pregnancy; I had been really worried that it would be intense. A food’s flavor isn’t completely dependent upon its taste. Our taste buds enable us to to detect sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Anything else we “taste” is actually a function of smell, and this is how we perceive flavor. A food with a strong odor might be unappealing to a child who might otherwise not mind its taste alone.

As a child of maybe 8 or 9, I distinctly remember sitting at the dinner table for what felt like hours (probably not, but my parents had long finished their meals by that time). A common plate was potatoes, sauteed peas and onions, and too-chewy beef strips. I remember chewing and chewing and chewing the beef, until there was no flavor left in my mouth and I still hadn’t broken the beef down into anything I could swallow. I remember doing the same with ground beef and onions, in theory easy to chew, but I would chew and chew until there was no flavor, and it made very hard for me to swallow the flavorless mass. Even with foods I could easily eat, and perhaps even enjoyed eating, I would still have leftovers on my plate that my mom would try to force me to eat. After much refusal, I’d satisfy the one more bite plea, only to be offered one bite after another.

I learned as a child that if I plugged my nose, I wouldn’t taste what I was eating. I rarely employed this, because my mom saw this as a grave insult to her cooking, but sometimes it was what I had to because there was always so much pressure to finish what was on my plate. Perhaps I can detect more flavors in foods than other people can, be they favorable or unfavorable. I differentiate between seafood that has been stored properly and cooked and others that are either naturally more “fishy” tasting, or were otherwise frozen improperly. Meanwhile I think my husband has chronic rhinitis; his nose is always “plugged” or congested. He adds chili peppers to almost every meal he eats, and I think it helps open up his nasal passages to help him better enjoy the flavor of the foods.

As we grow older, eating changes. By college, some people eat to be social, some eat because of mood disorders, some eat to enjoy the taste. I ate out of necessity – I got hungry, I ate. Simple as that. I think I lived off of fettuccine with bechamel sauce, toasted almonds and greek salad with great feta and no dressing for 5 years. If I had a class to attend during dinner time, I’d throw a loaf of bread and peanut butter in my backpack out of convenience, and possibly eat them separately. I could eat my “staples” for long periods of time. In high school, my daily lunch was a Nutella sandwich and a can of Ensure (my parents were always trying to make sure I was getting my nutrients). Then there was a time I’d have a cheese bagel for lunch every day for a year. I viewed eating largely as just a necessity, and whatever was easy to keep on hand would be what I ate, sometimes with little regard to nutritional value. I’d like to say there’s a term for this, but I don’t think there is. I could call it laziness. Apparently it’s something that is rare in adults and more prevalent in children who are “picky eaters.”

In college, I worked at a local pharmacy. I would have one Toblerone a day. Sometimes two. I had a running I-owe-you tab in the pharmacy, and at the end of the month I had bought the equivalent of two cases of Toblerones. It was so bad, that my boss called me during his run to Costco and asked how many cases of Toblerones I wanted. I was the kid that had one bite of chocolate and was done for the day. Today, I am still that kid. So I was very aware of how strange it was for me to crave Toblerones everyday, and I thought perhaps I was missing something in my diet. I never took the time to look into then, but now I realize that it could have signified a magnesium deficiency. My college fare was definitely not comprised of magnesium rich foods like dark leafy greens, wheat grass, beans, fish, whole grains. Apparently chocolate can help counting skills, which is humorous to me now because my job at the time, in addition to cashiering, was to count tablets by fives.

A zinc deficiency can distort taste and smell perceptions, making foods taste much more bland, and texture can become a bigger issue. I remember getting a bad cold in high school and not being able to taste or smell. I ate a cheese quesadilla and was totally put off by the only thing I could sense – the texture. If it had pieces of chicken, or crunchy peppers, I think it would have much been easier to swallow. I’ve always loved my carbs – breads and pastas are some of my favorites. But apparently processed foods like bagels, breads, cereals, pastas, instant oatmeal, crackers (this encompasses pretty much everything I live on) can deplete zinc. Even after the deficiency is corrected, eating problems can still persist due to sensory memory. My aunt is a doctor and had recommended I supplement with zinc for my acne as a teenager – I wonder if I had been more diligent about taking it if I would have been a better eater.

Psychological factors also come into play. I remember learning years ago in psychology class that children given ice cream during chemotherapy treatments came to dislike ice cream, even if it was a favorite food previously. I remember once I had eaten a huge papaya. The house we were in was incredibly hot, and I quickly became super nauseated and threw up. To this day papaya, and even cantaloupe, tastes like vomit to me, and I used to love papaya. Now that I read up on it a bit, parents are discouraged from giving their children their favorite foods when they are becoming ill because they can draw negative associations between the food and how they feel, which can lead to a food aversion.

Now that I have a child of my own who is getting ready for solids, I’ve been thumbing through the book, Child of Mine. The premise is, cook your child good, nutritious food, and let them decide how much they want to eat and whether they eat any or all of it. Where was this when I was a kid? The book highlights parents’ fears that that their kids either don’t eat enough (mine shared that fear!) or that their kid eats too much, but I guess the root of this idea is that it’s your job is to put the good food down in front of them, and you need to give your kid the freedom to decide how much they want to eat, because it will meet their body’s needs. Some days it may look like less, some days it may look like more.

It is a little disconcerting to my parents and my husband that I’m showing interest in forgoing rice cereal in favor of baby led weaning. There have been a lot of great posts here on Hellobee if you want to see what it’s all about. When I first heard the term, I thought it meant that the baby decided when they wanted to wean off of breast milk. How cool would it be to have my baby feed herself her first food? Oh do I remember all the broccoli airplanes my parents tried to coax me into eating.

I found it really interesting to learn the reasoning behind the development of iron-fortified rice cereal, which has been the standard first solid babies have received for decades. According to the weekly parent-baby class I attend, rice cereal was developed during WWII when mothers had to enter the workforce, even with very young newborns at home. Wet nurses had fallen out of favor, and formula was an expense that many mothers could not afford. The milk in the fridge was convenient and inexpensive, however an infant’s digestive tract has a hard time digesting  cow’s milk, and many babies suffered GI bleeds which led to iron deficiency. To this end, fortified iron-cereal was brought to market, and it has stayed on for decades, despite the fact today’s babies aren’t experiencing this cow’s milk-induced iron deficiency.

With this in mind, I’m interested in exploring other options than store-bought rice cereal. Whether I choose to make my own brown rice cereal (organic or not, it could still be laced with arsenic?!) or take the time to cook and possibly puree food, I can’t help but think that before our modern technology and scientific advancements in nutrition, that babies have been fed and have thrived throughout the ages. Yes, the infant mortality rates are probably at an all time low, and our lifespan exceeds the 30 or 40 years we would have expected in the middle ages, but there’s something to be said about good, wholesome food that people have eaten since the beginning of time, before things were refined and processed. Over the last 100 years or so, science has been busy developing and redeveloping the best formulas and baby foods that reflected the newest findings of the day, be it carbohydrates, sugars, or the discovery of vitamins. But now, science can support the nutritional value of basic foods that have taken me 30 years to learn to love – avocados, yams, beans, squash…. even five years ago I would never dream of looking forward to eating any of those things.

Now I’m eating all kinds of foods laced with all kinds of spices that are probably flowing into my breastmilk. I was formula fed as a baby, so perhaps my daughter will be more adventurous because she had this exposure to different flavors early on. My hope is that with with breastfeeding and the introduction of wholesome solids that my baby can eat herself and be more of a foodie than I ever was early on. So cheers, to all the picky eaters out there… may our babies be less picky than we were!

Were you a picky eater? Are you doing anything to avoid raising a picky eater?