food fights

This article on children who are picky eaters appeared in this week's NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/dining/

Apparently, children will eat anything until they're two, and then nothing. Maybe. If you or your spouse were a picky eater, the odds that your children will also be picky is quite high, as pickiness seems to be a genetic trait. The article details some of the evolutionary reasons that refusing new and strange and bitter foods might have been a survival skill. (The main lesson for those of you with infants is to feed them the maximum diversity of foods until they're old enough to refuse, in the hope that they will return to variety sooner rather than later.)

Now, anyone who ate dinner with my family during my childhood probably remembers (and may still be scarred by) the epic battles that occurred at mealtimes. I refused to eat most things, especially if they were green or touching each other. Mom and Dad insisted I try at least one bite of everything (this was later upped to finishing whatever small portion of green things was on my plate). I was pretty stubborn and so were they, and so many meals ended with me sitting at the table by myself, staring down some peas. By some magic transformation, I now eat pretty much everything - I am not only omnivorous but open to new tastes and spices and ingredients. Overripe bananas and tapioca are still out, however, on textural grounds.

Steve was picky both as a child and as a young adult. He didn't like a lot of foods and he wasn't terribly open to trying new things either. He too is fairly adventurous now - he's more of a germaphobe than a finicky eater - although there are still some foods he is squeamish about. Liver is a definite out, as we discovered in Taiwan when I mistakenly ordered it (hey, my Chinese wasn't great, and I saw the character for beef and thought the dish sounded fine!).

My mom and dad read the Times article and promptly descended into finger-pointing. I quote:
"Given the article's suggestion that genes account for 78 per cent of the child's eating habits, we wondered here about the two of us. I called your grammy. She says she doesn't recall any of the four of us being finicky. Then again, when I was a toddler, she and I were alone and she recalls I could eat whatever I pleased. So perhaps I wasn't really tested. Your mom promptly said she was a perfect little child, of course. But then she had to admit her mom used to say she was a bit cranky about what she would eat. So perhaps that's where the genes come from?"

Anyway. I think we're doomed. :)