Because different people are sensitive to different things - you don’t like scratchy - but scratchy isn’t a common food attribute. Other people don’t like slimy or stringy - which are food attributes. For other people its a smell.
I hated roast beef as a kid - it was the stringy meat thing. Still don’t like it. I’m far from a picky eater (and, in my house, I ate the roast beef and the liver and the beets and the cooked cabbage). I also can’t stand runny yolks - they smell horrible and even watching someone eat them will make me gag.
I think that really is a different mechanism. Starvation causes intense lethargy, and starving kids are generally uninterested in anything. Plumpy’nut is sweet and has a pleasing consistency, which can manage to rouse some interest. But it’s not like they are just turning their nose up at other foods because they are picky.
I had a friend who was kind of a picky eater as a kid, a little as an adult too. Not to the extreme though, I gave him a hard time about it, because we always gave each other a hard time about everything.
I had things I didn’t like but generally at someone else’s house, I just ate it if it was presented to me, regardless, at least most of it. It was just polite. You just didn’t complain about that stuff.
I have one kid who eats anything and one kid who is extremely picky. I didn’t do anything different - they’re just wired differently. I eat anything and my husband was very picky as a child, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a hereditary basis to it.
We have a one taste rule, but other than that I’m not prepared to make a giant power struggle out of it. I just make at least one thing at each meal that I know she’ll eat and otherwise I don’t cater to it.
She’s at other people’s houses for meals quite often, and if there’s nothing there she likes, she’ll just drink milk. She’s been taught to be polite about it though, and her friends’ parents know her preferences and don’t have a problem having something on hand that she’ll eat. She’s only six, and she’s gradually trying different things, so I’m hopeful that she’ll grow out of it.
Would she starve to death if I didn’t offer her preferred foods? I really have no idea. But she’s happy, healthy, and at a proper weight, so I have no great desire to make a huge issue out of it.
I never made my kids eat anything they didn’t like. Nor did I accommodate their food preference du jour. If they didn’t like what I cooked, they were free to make something else of their choosing. I certainly wasn’t going to make another meal for them. If they didn’t like the vegetable I chose, they had to substitute another fruit or vegetable of their choosing, but both the meat and the starch were optional.
Both college-age daughters are healthy and don’t have weight issues. One daughter is still relatively picky, though she is expanding her food repertoire little by little. My older daughter has grown to be way more adventurous than I am. When she spent a summer in Korea, there was only one food that she wouldn’t try.
I won’t force a kit to eat something he doesn’t like but I won’t allow them to fill up on one kind of food and ignore another. They get a reasobale portion of each and can have more if they eat what is on their plate. If I know they don’t like something I will put a tiny amount on their plate just in case they want to try it. They often do with vegis and end up liking them. I find a hungry child is a little more receptive to trying new things.
Seems to me picky eaters can only be picky due to the explosion of cheap, readily available food from all corners of the globe in the last 100 years or so. How could you be a picky kid in the middle ages, or caveman days? Here’s a chunk of mammoth meat and some nuts and berries we found within walking distance of camp. Don’t like it? Too bad. Expect the same tomorrow.
If I suspected my son “didn’t like” something because it was new or different, I had a 5 bite rule. Five bites and I will make you something you want. Usually by bite 3, he discovered he actually did like it and was happy eating it. I could tell by bite 2 if he really didn’t like it and would make him something else or tell him he didn’t have to eat it (if it was only part of the meal).
If my son had been super picky, but the foods he wanted to eat were relatively healthy, I wouldn’t have had a problem conceding to his tastes most of the time.
For people who say their kids are so picky and will only eat chicken nuggets or pizza, I suspect that is a monster the parents created.
Most picky eating is mental, in my experiences (and still holds true for many adults, for example, in cases where they find out “it’s not chicken”). I was very picky coming up, but that gradually changed, partially because of the idea in your thread, and other times because tastes can be acquired (I also had a big thing about texture).
That said, yes, I would eventually eat. True hunger trumps BS, almost every time, and contrary to what your brain thinks, your stomach is also the boss.
I could also be fooled into trying things, by cutting them up small enough not to see. I’ve tried a number of things this way, at times to my embarrassment
There’s got to be someone on here who has lived in a Third World country, or in some other situation where preparing something else was not an option. Do parents there have to deal with this problem, and if so, how?
I missed rationing by about 20 years luckily, but there may well be some other UK dopers who were children, or whose parents were children, during the latter stages of WWII and the early post-war years when rationing was still active and food variety (and quantity) was severely restricted.
I’ll ask my father about this next time I see him.
When I was around 12 I went through a picky eater phase that didn’t last long. All I wanted to eat was either hamburgers or hot dogs for dinner. My mother went the eat what I make, or don’t eat. Up to you route.
I grew out of it pretty fast. I wasn’t too keen on most of the food but I ate it. Now I love everything.
I think a neurotypical child would not starve. One of my daughters boyfriends was halfway through his second helping of gumbo before we found out he didn’t like it but was hungry.
Autism spectrum, I don’t know. I am high functioning and have no texture issues, but I had a few ‘never eats’ as a kid. I would skip meals rather than eat something I didn’t like because I didn’t feel hunger or thirst. I ate very little, mostly because I ate for pleasure or because it was time to eat. I’m sure I would be diagnosed with failure to thrive now, as I didn’t break 50 pounds until 7th grade.
To this day, I eat and drink on a schedule so I won’t get dehydrated or pass out with low blood sugar (happens if I get busy and forget to eat). I think some kids on the spectrum wouldn’t eat, and wouldn’t perceive it as a battle of wills because of the zero effort it takes to not eat what you hate when you aren’t hungry.
Yes, the children’s home in Brazil where I worked. Like I said: when we started serving vegetables the first month we had plates flying through the dining hall 2x a day. That ended and everyone was fine. They were free to pick fruit from the garden any time they wanted, and they did. But there was no alternative to what was served, and they were always hungry by supper time. They would just gulp down what they didn’t like very quickly and be done with it, but most simply learned to eat most things.
Breakfast was donated old bread and really not great. I tried to make it palatable by making jams and sometimes, when we were donated the ingredients, I’d mix cocoa, sugar and butter to make chocolate spread. It was pretty crappy, but there were no complaints and the children were very genuinely grateful when I made the chocolate concoction.
This may be true in a lot of cases, but it’s not at all true if a child would literally rather starve than eat certain foods, or in situations which make them feel unable to eat. And it’s not as uncommon as you’d think. Besides my personal experience being a failure-to-thrive kid, I’ve known a bunch of parents whose young children had weight and growth problems due to them not eating much of anything at all for years. Kids are such emotionally driven creatures, and when they develop bad emotional associations with eating, the resulting health problems can be serious. I believe I permanently stunted my growth as a kid.
That said, when I have children of my own I will not be treating them like delicate flowers and catering to each with only their favorite foods, I want them to develop a healthy palate early in life. But I will have an eye out for serious emotional and eating issues like my previous one, and if any manifest I think it’s much better to compromise your ideals in order to get a kid to eat enough calories to grow normally.
In 3rd world countries with frequent famine, the development and distribution of a peanut paste called Plumpy’nut has saved the lives of countless starving children - in part because it tastes so good. Previously, the treatment for severe malnutrition and starvation in young children involved hospitalization and tube feeding, or trying to encourage kids to drink enriched milk-like weight gain formulas (which had to be mixed with water, and refrigerated). Needless to say this wasn’t very effective. Plumpy’nut doesnt need refrigeration, is easy to eat and tastes delicious, so the children will feed it to themselves.
