I had already written a book about the history of American food. While researching, I kept encountering sources about children eating very differently in the past—and clearly with pleasure. At the same time, I had a baby. I was given parenting advice saying kids are naturally picky and not to push. I knew that advice was new. I dug into sources from the nineteenth century and saw that no one talked about childhood pickiness at all. Childish eating meant curiosity and lack of discrimination. It meant eating anything.

I started parenting differently, feeding my child differently. She resisted new foods all the time and almost certainly would have been labeled picky in another modern family. But I gained confidence from my historical knowledge. We fed her exactly the same foods we were, talked about why we loved them, limited snacking, and didn’t provide alternatives. That’s countercultural now, but in the past there often were no alternatives. Even wealthy families didn’t have instant foods. I tried to recreate those conditions with love, humor, and joy. I had similar experiences with my other children. They were all extremely wary of new foods at first, but I had confidence there was another way. They all became as omnivorous and excited about food as children in the past.

Parents today are deeply stressed around food. Of course they don’t want their kids to be picky, but at the same time, many can’t imagine that children could actually learn to like the same foods as adults. A lot of what we think of as “common sense” around children’s food today came from advice from midcentury psychologists, who told parents it was harmful to encourage children to eat anything in particular, and from midcentury marketers, who encouraged everyone to have distinct preferences. All of this made it much harder to share food as a family.