Similarly, I was always disappointed with most raw tomatoes served at fast food/fast casual locations. Which in my experience, was because they mostly went (like most year-round options in the US) with the longest-lasting, firmest tomatoes that had all the flavor of wet cardboard. When I went to my first upscale restaurant, that did locally sourced and fresh tomatoes, my eyes were opened in wonder. These days, I generally only eat tomatoes in season, when they’re coming in by the bucket from my mother-in-law’s garden, and the excess gets dehydrated or made into sauces.
It’s also common for canned tomatoes and sauces to be better tasting in my experience, because they’re picked and used when ripe, and appearance and shipping-tolerance doesn’t matter in those applications.
It’s one of the reasons why a lot of cooking media (books, shows) will tell you to use quality canned tomatoes instead of “fresh” tomatoes unless you know how/when to source them.
Back to kids though, even I admit that the texture of a fresh, ripe slice of tomato can be darn challenging, with seeds and goo, despite their inviting color!
I didn’t say it’s always the case, just that a lot of the time it is the case. I’ve seen it with one of my sons and several kids in their Cub/Boy scout troops.
They’ll be cranky and bitchy about food until they’re basically confronted with the option of eating what was available or go hungry, and then lo and behold, they like the stuff they were refusing to eat (chili, in my younger son’s case). That’s a control thing, or possibly a fear/anxiety thing, although in my son’s case it was completely control, because he’d waffle back and forth on things based on how he was feeling, and what those things were moved around as well. It was totally a way to have his say, not something consistent that he would stick to. And he’d just refuse to try stuff that would be stuff he should like- he loves pasta, loves cheese, but would not try macaroni and cheese.
Some other kids are so choosy that it borders on mental illness- they can’t be that palately challenged.
That said, I do recall there being things that I loved and hated as a child that I feel differently about now, and a few that I’ve cycled back to liking again. I mean, I didn’t like raw onions much as a kid, but I’m ok with them now. Didn’t like spicy food, still don’t much like raw tomatoes, never have like cantaloupe, was apprehensive about sauerkraut because of the smell, but turns out I like it, and so forth.
Again, this is what some adults think without considering that children have a very different experience with and relationship to food and eating. For adults (at least those with a broad experience with different foods) they know what they like, digests well, and doesn’t give them intestinal distress or bad dreams. Children often approach any new food with trepidation because they are evolutionarily wired to be suspicious of new foods with unusual tastes and smells, and new or unliked foods are a source of stress. To an adult, that looks like being ‘picky’; to a child with little volition about pretty much every thing in their life, having the safety of a ‘comfort food’ is as much stress avoidance as preference. And frankly, adults are often obtuse to the experience and issues that children have with some foods like bloating, gas, and mild allergies. This is not to say that parents shouldn’t encourage children to try new foods and eat a more balanced diet than processed chicken nuggets and ketchup, but many parents make it a point to force children to eat food they find repugnant as a matter of some kind of principle even when there are acceptable compromises, and then somehow believe that the child has some kind of master plan in trying to exert control or in your words being a “b-hole” to deliberately aggravate them.
Picky eating is a luxury so recent, I doubt it has had time to to be relevant to evolution. Picky eating on an evolutionary scale would work against survival in times of scarcity or limited variety.
I believe it was very evolutionarily helpful for small autonomous children to be conservative as to what they would eat.
We made sure to have something on the table that the kids were familiar with and would eat. And we insisted they try a taste of everything. But only a small taste. Except when they were five. We told our children that five year olds are picky eaters, and they didn’t have to try new foods from when they turned five until they turned six. This worked beautifully, both to validate their suspicion of new foods, and also to prepare them for the idea that we expected them to try new foods again when they were a little older.
And if they consistently said they didn’t like the same food after dutifully tasting them a dozen times, we stopped asking them to try it. People do have different tastes. But we never fought over food. There are lots of ways in which we weren’t great parents, but we had happy meal times and our kids learned to eat lots of food with minimal mealtime stress.
In the modern developed world we’re accustomed to having a wide array of different foods from multiple cuisines which are generally safe to eat. But with a few exceptions, pre-industrial, and especially pre-agricultural cultures generally had just a handful of staples that might rotate seasonly; there wasn’t anything to be picky about because there really wasn’t much in the way of choices in food. New and unfamiliar foods that might be toxic or allergenic would be a risk.
Wouldn’t it be just as true that new and unfamiliar foods might be an advantage if you were brave enough to try them?
I mean, it seems to be fairly common for people to be both very adventurous and very much not so, even among adults, with most people being somewhere in the middle.
Ask that question of someone who just ate some toxic mushrooms. Experimenting with new foods is a societal benefit but with substantial risk to the individual.
It’s true of most traits that individuals within a species fall across a range. Being bold or cautious in general is a trait that is distributed in a very wide range of species. When situations are stable, being cautious is advantageous. When conditions change, it’s often valuable to be bold. So both are selected for at different times.
It’s true that American kids are pickier than kids in many other countries, and I’ve heard it chalked up to:
We expect it and accept it.
Our kids drink so much milk they are rarely hungry at meal times.
Our kids eat so many snacks they aren’t hungry at meal times.
I suspect it’s also partly that parents in America tend to feed special baby food to toddlers, rather than giving them a variety of adult foods.
But i also think it’s a question of degree. I really do think it’s normal for preschoolers to be very cautious about new foods
I think a lot of it is both of these things together - a kid who has been eating a variety of adult foods from the time they started eating solid food who loves sardines at two isn’t likely to suddenly start hating them at five but giving a five year old sardines for the first time is probably going to go differently. And also , to a certain degee “picky” is only used for a certain type of pickiness - nobody else would have called my kids picky when they didn’t want to order from the kid’s menu and preferred fried calamari.
Also, children from what I know have a stronger sense of taste than adults, and so something may taste more bitter, pungent etc. than to an adult. Like probably many people, I didn’t like beer and coffee the first time I tried it. As an adult, I drink copious quantities of both.
I may have been a picky eater as a kid, but my father was and still is one at the age of 77. When he met my mother, he told her he didn’t eat fish, poultry or entrails. These foods literally gross him out just to be near them. Or so he says. In fact, he only rarely eats meat and survives on a diet of brown bread, lots of yogurt, fruit, and seeds. Sometimes he’ll eat an egg or some beef soup or something.
I did this with Cad Jr. The rule on new food was he had to take two bites. If he didn’t like the first bite the second one was to confirm or deny if he truly didn’t like it. After that, he didn’t have to eat it.
Yeah, what we think of as an “adventurous eater” is usually someone selecting from a curated list of foods served in controlled conditions. Even foreign scenarios like “local rural village mystery fare” are still things the people there had been eating for ages. Different from just eating random stuff off the forest floor.
Of course; I’m just saying that some kids are picky because they choose to be, not because of their palates or whatever else is going on in their heads. They choose not to eat some things because it’s something they can control, not because it tastes bad to them, or anything like that.
To use my son again, the boy loves pasta. He also loves cheese- sharp cheddar even. But combine them into macaroni and cheese, and he used to balk. Why? Certainly not because it’s something that somehow tastes worse together, or even different together, but rather because he can. For him, it was some weird “I’m going to choose, even if makes no sense.” type of thing. He has never been stuck on completely bland foods- he has always loved Chinese soup dumplings, wontons in spicy sauce (紅油抄手), and several other dishes from our local Chinese place.
I was never picky, but there has always been a list of things that I don’t like. Coffee and beer are two that I didn’t pick up until my late teens/early 20s, for example. Still don’t like raw tomatoes, although I’ll eat them instead of pitching a fit. Only got to where I actually enjoy raw onions on some things in my 40s.
But that never meant that having a sip of my grandfather’s beer was so awful that it put me off of trying other stuff; it just meant that I logged that one under “beer tastes bitter and moldy”, and left it there until my last year of high school. Same thing with coffee, although it was “liquid coffee is bitter, coffee flavored stuff can be pretty good, particularly those coffee flavored candies my grandfather liked.”
I’m fascinated by how much discussion this question has engendered. The OP isn’t being very careful about where they eat if the existence of a kid’s menu spoils the experience for them.
It sounds like the real topic under discussion is children’s eating habits - the thread title seems like an odd misdirection.
I think most people, regardless of how they think you should deal with picky kids, seem to agree that a children’s menu is a good thing for keeping peace in the restaurant and aren’t put off by the words “Chicken Nuggets” on the back of the menu.
I don’t believe children dislike certain foods because control.
There was a food I hated when young. My mother wanted to control and I had to sit there until she realized I was going to attempt to eat it and gag or just sit there.
I ate everything else she made, including liver which tasted awful to me.
My son tried everything. Eventually he realized he didn’t like rice so why would I try and force him?