Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History is, in some ways, an academic book—based on a decade of archival research and grounded in thousands of primary sources—but it’s not just an academic book. Much more than I would have imagined in the past, it’s a bit personal. I talk a little about my own family and my own children at the beginning. The epilogue is what you might call parenting ideas, because the lessons for the present were so obvious in this case, unlike most history books.

Historians are not necessarily good at predicting the future or saying what we should do to prevent problems. We talk about the past and causality. I think we do have lessons in almost every history. But in this case, talking about the history of picky eating—this mass phenomenon, childhood pickiness—that turns out to be culturally specific. It does not exist in all times and places. That can be shocking to people because we’ve been told pickiness is natural, biological, evolutionary. People assume that if children in the past or in other cultures weren’t picky, it must have been because of scarcity—because children were forced to eat foods they hated since there were no alternatives.

But when you look at the past—especially the early twentieth century and before, and my book starts in the early nineteenth century—what becomes obvious is that children weren’t just forcing down foods they hated. They approached foods we think of as acquired or adult tastes, with enormous pleasure. Real pleasure. Sometimes this was because of scarcity, but the United States was also the most abundant country in the world in the nineteenth century. Children growing up in middle-class or wealthy households who had choices and alternatives were loving food, too—many kinds of foods.

So the argument that pickiness is natural and inevitable doesn’t hold up. That’s extremely hard for parents to hear. I try to understand mass pickiness as a historical phenomenon that has shaped how we think about childhood, pleasure, food, and biology. I realized many of our beliefs about biology are not right. Biology plays a role, and some people are more prone to pickiness than others, but prolonged pickiness as an inevitable life stage is simply not true.

I felt it was important in the epilogue to break down the historical changes that led to mass pickiness and then talk about concrete steps parents can take to reverse those changes in their own families. Some are easier than others. Some are more comfortable to hear. We’ve been told by psychologists, advice givers, and marketers not to do the very things parents did in the past to produce non-picky children. We’ve been told those things will mess kids up psychologically, create dysfunctional eaters, obesity, eating disorders.

One lesson from history is that people in the past weren’t messing up their kids when it came to food. Sometimes they were in other ways, but when Americans expected kids to share family foods, kids grew up liking family foods. They also grew up with healthy body weights and healthy relationships with food. Problems like eating disorders, dysfunctional relationships with food, prolonged family conflict around food, and obesity only really emerged in the mid- to late twentieth century, just when pickiness emerged. So the idea that teaching kids to like family foods will mess them up doesn’t hold up. An analogy I think about is gender. Two hundred years ago, people would have said women couldn’t be athletes, speakers, leaders—even women would have believed that based on biological experience. Our experiences of biology are shaped by culture.

Ongoing thread. More from Helen Zoe Veit to follow.